Facts and friction

IN HER LAST blockbuster, Janette Turner Hospital explored fundamentalism in the shape of an Outback doomsday messiah named Oyster. Her latest, Due Preparations For The Plague, pivots on equally dramatic material: the impact of an imaginary 1987 Air France hijacking codenamed Operation Black Death.

The perpetrators, Islamic extremists, release all the children and later remove 10 adult hostages from the flight, only to gas them in a bunker in the Middle East. The children are left to try to make sense of what happened.

Heavy stuff and, dressed in black at Sydney's Intercontinental hotel, the blonde 62-year-old, who rarely cracks a smile, cuts a rather frosty figure. 'It's 'Janet',' she snaps, underlining the pronunciation of her first name.

Since her 1982 debut, The Ivory Swing, she has garnered mixed reviews. The Times Literary Supplement hailed her as 'one of the most powerful and innovative writers in English today'. American author Joyce Carol Oates described her as 'a writer of consummate craft and visionary insight'. Other critics, such as Michele Roberts, say she's corny.

Either way, Turner Hospital, the distinguished professor of English at the University of South Carolina, is undoubtedly saturated in literature as her allusion-dense espionage thriller shows. The title comes verbatim from a book by the 18th-century English novelist best known for Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe.

The idea for 10 of the hostages becoming holed up in a bunker came from the Decameron by the pre-Renaissance Italian poet Boccaccio, which depicts 10 young people cocooning themselves from plague in a Florence villa in 1348. The French existentialist Albert Camus also influenced the book, which quotes his line from his 1947 horror novel La Peste about how plague always takes people by surprise, just like terrorism.